Nocturne (17 page)

Every one of them wanted black Richard dead.

Black Richard was their link to the dead girl, who had died by accident, after all, and for whom they most certainly were
not about to ruin their lives, all three of them accepted at
Harvard
? Hey.

So as Richard thrashed around in the tub, trying to keep his head above water, the three other Richards kept forcing him back
under again, time after time, avoiding his pummeling fists, trying not to get themselves all wet, trying just to for Christ’s
sake
drown
him.

They were succeeding in doing just that, Richard finally succumbing to their overpowering insistence, subsiding below the
surface of the water, hands unclenching at last, a final thin bubble of air escaping his mouth and rising, rising, when a
voice behind them yelled, “The fuck you
doin
?”

They were each and separately, all three Richards, overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of déjà vu all over again, a black man
standing there with outraged surprise on his face, only this time Richard the First had a knife, and he snapped the blade
open at once because the last thing on earth they needed was yet
another
asshole linking them to a murder.

Jamal remembered too late what his sacred mother had taught him about the streets of this here city, and that was Mind yo
own business, son, an stay out of harm’s way. But this wasn’t a city street, this was the bathroom of a onetime business associate
and sometime friend, and he was being drowned in a bathtub by three fuckin college boys, or whatever they were, and one of
them had a knife in his fist and he was coming at Jamal with a tiny little smile on his face. It was then that Jamal knew
this was serious. Man with a big mother knife in his hand and a smile on his face was dangerous. But, of course, all of this
was too late, the memory of his mother’s admonition, the memory of smiles he had seen on the faces of other would-be assassins,
of whom there were far too many in this part of the city in this part of the world.

Smiling, Richard the First slashed Jamal’s jugular with a single swipe of the blade, and then dropped the knife as if it were
on fire.

The other two Richards went pale.

And now it became the tale of a handbag.

The door to Svetlana Dyalovich’s apartment was padlocked and a printed
crime scene
notice was tacked to it. But Meyer and Kling had obtained a key from the Property Clerk’s Office, and they marched right
in.

“What a dump,” Meyer said.

“Smells, too,” Kling said.

“Cat piss,” Meyer agreed.

A pair of uniformed cops had already delivered the old lady’s dead cat to the Humane Society for cremation, but Meyer and
Kling didn’t know that, and besides the apartment still stank. They
did
know that Carella and Hawes, and presumably the technicians from the Mobile Crime Unit, had conducted a thorough search of
the apartment. But this morning Carella had suggested that they might have missed something—namely a hundred and twenty-five
thousand dollars in cash—and another run-through might be a good idea.

They both thought about that kind of money for a moment.

A hundred and twenty-five thousand was about a third more than their combined annual salaries.

It was a sobering thought.

They began looking.

There was a dead man in the bathtub and another dead man on the bathroom floor. One of them had been drowned, and the other’s
throat had been slit. This almost had comic possibilities. Too bad the one bleeding all over the tile floor wasn’t named Richard,
too. Then there would have been
five
Richards in the apartment instead of just four, three of whom were running around looking for a red patent-leather bag. The
fourth one wasn’t doing any running at all. The fourth one would never do any running ever again. Nor swimming, either, which
he’d never learned to do, anyway. None of the live Richards knew who the other dead man was, and they were squeamish about
going through his pockets for identification. Slitting a man’s throat was one thing. Frisking him was quite another.

Richard the First knew the girl’s handbag had to be in this apartment someplace. It didn’t have
legs
, did it? She herself had carried it up here, and they themselves had carried her out of here without it. So where the hell
was it? He was eager to find that bag because it contained traveler’s checks with their signatures on them, and these could
all too easily link them to the dead girl, and by extension the man they’d drowned and the one whose throat they’d slit.

In his mind, the three Richards had acted and were still acting in concert. No longer was it he alone who’d slit the second
black man’s throat. Now it was
they
who’d done it. Just as it was
they
who were now looking for the patent-leather bag that would irrevocably tie them to the girl who’d died by accident because
she’d been too reticent to tell them she was having difficulty breathing. An asthmatic shouldn’t have been in her profession,
anyway, the things unfeeling men asked her to do with her mouth.

Neither of the other two Richards quite shared the first Richard’s feelings about the second murder. The
first
murder, of course, was drowning black Richard in the tub, a necessity. The girl had not been murdered; you couldn’t count
her as a murder victim. All of them firmly believed the girl had died by accident. However, both the second Richard and the
third Richard knew damn well that neither of them had slit the black stranger’s throat, whoever he may have been and no longer
was. Richard the First was solely responsible for
that
little bit of mayhem. So whereas they dutifully turned that apartment upside down, trying to find that elusive handbag, they
did so only because they didn’t want the dead girl to come back to haunt them. And though neither of them would dare speak
such a blasphemy aloud, if push ever came to shove they were quite willing to throw old Lion-Heart here to the lions.

At the end of a half hour’s search, they still had not found the bag.

It was now twenty minutes to two.

“Where would
you
be if you were a red patent-leather handbag?” Richard the First asked.

“Where indeed?” Richard the Second asked.

Richard the Third stood in the center of the room, scratching his ass and thinking. “Let’s reconstruct it minute by minute,”
he said. “From when we first met her on the street to when we carried her out of here.”

“Oh yes,
let’s
do that,” Richard the Second said sarcastically. “Two dead
Negroes
in the bathroom, with more of their friends possibly coming to visit, we have
all
the time in the world.”

Richard the First hadn’t heard anyone using the word “Negroes” in a very long time.

“She definitely had that bag in her hand when she stepped out of the taxi,” he said.”

“She had it here in this apartment, too,” Richard the Third said. “She put the traveler’s checks and the jumbos in it. I saw
her do that with my own eyes.”

“Okay, so where did she put it when we started making love?”

Richard the Second’s use of this euphemism startled the other two. He saw their surprised looks and shrugged.

“Does anyone remember?”

No one remembered.

So they started searching the apartment yet another time.

Meyer and Kling were experienced at searching apartments. They knew where people hid money and jewelry. Lots of old people,
they didn’t trust banks. Suppose you fell down in the bathtub and hurt yourself and nobody found you till you starved to death
and were all skin and bones, how could you go to the bank to take your money out? You couldn’t, was the answer. Also, if you
were an old person and you were squirreling away the bucks to give to your grandchildren, you didn’t want a bank account because
then there was a record, and Uncle Sam would come in and take almost all of it in inheritance taxes. So what lots of old people
did, they kept their money or their jewelry in various hiding places.

Ice cube trays were a favorite. Everybody figured no thief would ever dream of looking for gems in a tray of frozen ice cubes.
Except that some cheap writer of detective stories had written a book some time back in which a cheap thief froze diamonds
inside ice cubes and now everybody in the world knew about it, including
other
cheap thieves. Meyer and Kling were not thieves, cheap or otherwise, but they did know about the ice cube ploy. So hiding
your diamonds in an ice cube tray was a ridiculous thing to do since this was where most burglars looked first thing. Open
the fridge door, check out the freezer compartment,
there
you are, you little darlings!

Another favorite hiding place was inside the bottom rail of a venetian blind, which was weighted, and which had caps on either
end of it. You could remove these end caps and slide wristwatches or folded bills into the hollow rail. This worked very nicely,
except that every thief in the world knew about it. They also knew that people hid jewelry or money inside the bag on a vacuum
cleaner, or at the bottom of a toilet tank, or inside the globe of a ceiling light fixture from which the bulbs had been removed
so if anybody threw the switch you wouldn’t see the outline of a necklace up there under the glass.

Meyer and Kling tried all of these favorite hiding places.

And found nothing.

So they looked under the mattress.

There was nothing there, either.

The envelope looked as if it had been through the Crimean War. Perhaps Georgie and Tony shouldn’t have opened the envelope,
but then again they had been entrusted with the key to locker number 136 at the Rendell Road Bus Terminal, and if Priscilla
hadn’t wanted them to examine whatever they found in that locker, she should have specifically said so. Besides, the envelope
hadn’t been sealed. It was just a thick yellowing envelope with the word
Priscilla
written across the front of it, a bulging envelope with a rubber band around it, holding the flap closed.

There was money in the envelope.

Hundred-dollar bills.

Exactly a thousand of them.

Georgie and Tony knew because they took the envelope into the men’s room to count the bills.

A thousand hundred-dollar bills.

Which on their block came to a hundred thousand dollars in cold hard cash.

There was also a letter in the envelope.

This didn’t interest them as much as the money did, but they read it, anyway, though not in the men’s room.

It was Richard the Third who found the bag.

“Bingo!” he yelled.

Where he found the bag was under black Richard’s mattress, the dope. Did he think they were so dumb they wouldn’t look under
the
mattress
, where for Christ’s sake everybody in the entire
world
hid things? What he must have done, they figured, was slide it in between the mattress and the bedsprings while they were
ripping off the sheets to wrap her in.

Nobody had yet touched the bag.

Richard the Third was still standing beside the bed with his parka on because it was freezing cold in this part of the city
unless you turned on a kerosene heater or a coal stove, grinning from ear to freckle-faced ear, holding up the corner of the
mattress to reveal the red patent-leather bag nestled there all shiny and flat.

Richard the Second took a pair of gloves from the pocket of his parka and pulled them on with all the aplomb of a surgeon
about to perform brain surgery. Gingerly, he lifted the bag from where it rested on the bedsprings. He unsnapped the flap,
opened the bag, and reached into it.

There was nineteen hundred dollars in cash in the bag.

Plus the ten jumbo vials black Richard had paid the girl for his piece of the action.

Plus nine hundred dollars in traveler’s checks respectively signed Richard Hopper, Richard Weinstock, and Richard O’Connor.
They each and separately pocketed the checks at once, and then debated whether or not to leave all the money and crack in
the bag, or to take some of it for all the trouble they’d gone through. It was Richard the First who suggested that a good
way to extricate themselves
entirely
was to link the dead girl to the two dead men. If they left her handbag in the bathroom, the presence of such a large amount
of cash, not to mention the sizable stash of crack, would lend credibility to the police theory that the hooker had been killed
in a robbery. Or what he
hoped
would be the police theory.

All three of them went into the bathroom.

Jamal, whose name they didn’t yet know, was still lying on his back on the floor with his throat slit. He had stopped bleeding.
Black Richard was lying on the bottom of the tub. Richard the Second suggested that they leave the bag open on the floor,
with a lot of hundred-dollar bills and a few jumbo vials spread on the tiles, as if the two of them had been fighting over
it before they killed each other.

Richard the Third looked puzzled.